


Just Climb

by Flame_05



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:33:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27900805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flame_05/pseuds/Flame_05
Summary: To lead the lawmen away from Dutch and Lenny, Arthur climbs.
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

His heart was thudding so hard in his chest he was surprised it hadn’t burst through his rib cage yet, even his ears were pounding with the pressure of the blood being hurtled around his body. His calves and thighs burned with exertion, his shoulders aching, elbows and wrists shaking, and hands near raw to the bone with scraped skin. 

Still, he pushed on.

He could hear them still giving chase, shouts echoing off brick and wood, feet thudding and splashing through the streets, and whistled piercing. He didn’t pause to look behind, could only keep moving and hope against hopes that they wouldn’t catch up to him.

The ladder clanged beneath his weight as he heaved himself up. The lawmen had so far followed him below on the streets, with a only a few men daring enough to try scaling the sides of buildings as he was. 

“Keep pushing, just keep climbing.” He mentally urged himself, certain that if he just got high enough, then moved fast enough, that the lawmen would lose him and he wouldn’t end this with a noose around his neck.

Or a rain of bullets bleeding his body.

Or shattered against the cobblestones now far below him.

“Don’t look down, just keep on pushing, dammit” he growled to himself and focussed on the roughness of the ladder against his already torn skin, the pain grounding him.

He flinched without thought as brick erupted near his head from a bullet, fired haphazardly from a lawman below. 

Cursing, he hauled himself over the wall and out of sight, keeping moving low and fast all the while expecting another bullet to embed itself in his body at any moment.

At least they were firing at him, he thought, and not the others. This would all be for nothing if they had still gone after the others.

The trolley had crashed hard, and in the precious few moments that he had to stop and look he could see the haze in Dutch’s eyes. That was no insignificant head wound, Hosea had taught him enough to know that. Dutch need quiet and rest, as soon as was possible, and he was in no fit state to be dodging bullets and evading lawmen.

Giving his mentor no choice in the matter, Arthur had hastily told Lenny to take him and hide, only moving to head back to camp once the lawmen had moved on.

“They ain’t gonna just leave” Lenny had panickily retorted, the fear apparent in his eyes as he grasped the upper arm of an unsteady Dutch. 

“Yeah kid, they will, dontchu’ worry about that.” Arthur had bit back, staring Lenny down as realisation dawned on the younger man. Then, before Dutch had any time to grasp the situation, Arthur had run, making sure that the lawmen had seen him.


	2. Climbing, or Falling?

With the amount of lawmen after him, he hoped that meant that none had hung around to hunt out Lenny and Dutch. 

He couldn’t be sure how much distance he had put between them, unaccustomed to cities most of the streets looked the same to him, and it was even harder to get his bearings while clambering across rooftops. 

Skidding to a halt he found himself in a tremendously bad spot, his only option being to climb down. Down, was where the lawmen could be mere moment away, and being arrested was not something he intended to happen today.

Cursing, he frantically looked around, but seeing on other option he carefully jumped down from the rooftop onto a lower level, cursing again he nearly lost his balance on the damp and slippery tiled roof he now found himself on.

He could hear the whistles of lawmen as they got closer, and he forced himself to start running to clear the open space and reach the opposite side, where he could once again haul himself up a walk onto the higher rooftops, where he at least hoped to be out of range of lawman bullets.

“I see him! Get over here, now!” Bellowed a lawman, who quickly made his way up stairs to a balcony where he was almost level with Arthur, and in perfect position to start firing.

“Give it up! Stop right there, or I will shoot!” The authority in the mans voice might have made lesser men freeze, but did nothing to waver Arthur as he continued forwards, getting ever closer the wall which would provide him shelter. Bullets began to fly by him and blindly, not daring to take his eyes of the surface in front of him, he fired back towards where he thought the lawman was.

A spluttered cry told him he must have hit the lawmen, and with the wall in front mere inches away he suddenly gasped as his side erupted in pain. The lawman had gotten one more shot in before succumbing to his wound, and had finally hit his target of Arthur.

A combination of the force of the bullet and his sheer surprise made Arthur stumble, and before he could even blink he had lost his footing and hit the roof tiles hard, sliding and rolling down until there was nothing but air beneath him.

Arthur didn’t fall as far as he feared, as his legs hitting a sloped rooftop he ignored the exertion burning in his thighs and managed to get his feet beneath him before he slid down too far.

With all his might he began to run diagonally upwards, trying to fight gravity, and still before any more lawmen had turned the corner he hauled himself up and onto a higher rooftop. Barely stopping to catch his breath, he pushed on, and resisting the urge to close his eyes as he neared the edge, he leapt.

Clearing several more rooftops, he finally stopped. Once his breathing had calmed he stood on still shaking legs, keen eyes scanning the city for any sign of the law.  
Their footsteps had faded, and Arthur could no longer hear their high pitched whistled. 

“That had best be the end of that” he grunted to himself. Not that he would ever admit it out loud, lest he start sounding like Hosea, but he was too old to be racing and climbing across rooftops. How he hadn’t fallen to his death was beyond him.

Just as he decided he would stay out of sight on the roof until morning, then move at first light when the law had hopefully given up on the hunt, a sharp pain in his side suddenly had him doubling.

He groaned in exasperation. Now that the adrenalin had worn off, he remembered he had been shot.


	3. Leap of Faith

A wave of dizziness suddenly washed over him, and Arthur felt himself sway on his feet. Giving himself a mental shake, he stepped back from the rooftop edge. It would be a fine thing to fall to his death now after having eluded the lawmen.

Heavily he dropped to the dirty rooftop and slowly rolled up his vest and shirt to inspect the wound. The bullet had gone clean in and out, not seeming to have hit anything internally but causing a considerable amount of pain regardless.  
It had also caused far too much blood loss, Arthur knew that, and the flow was still steadily staining his clothing and now the ground around.

At least he was up high, he thought, and not hiding on street level where any dogs the law sent after him would soon follow the scent of blood.

“Clean it, Morgan, you have to clean it.” Arthur mumbled to himself, looking around the rooftop as if a form of antiseptic would magically appear. 

Sighing in resignation, he pulled his necktie out, deliberately ignoring how dirty it was.

Grimshaw was going to have hide when he got back to camp, for trying to bandage his wound with material so dirty it was just inviting an infection to take hold. Hosea would no doubt give him a lecture too, that is if the two of them weren’t too busy tending to Dutch. That head wound had not looked good.

“Focus, dammit.” He hissed at himself. Worrying over Dutch, and whether he and Lenny had made it back to camp, was not going to help the current situation.

He ripped the necktie into   
two, balling each half up. Taking in a deep breath to brace himself, he pushed the balled up material into both the entrance and exit wound, grunting as his fingers pushed against soft torn flesh, warm sticky blood soon coating his hands. When he was done, to his relief, his efforts had appeared to slow the bleeding. 

Now, all he had to do was get back to camp uninterrupted by the law.

Spotting a lower rooftop just a little away, he pulled himself to his feet and got ready to jump over the alley onto the lower the surface, the first stage of making his way back to the streets.

Forcing himself to ignore the pain, dizziness, and growing nausea, he leapt.

The air was forced from his lungs as he landed hard on someone’s roof, tumbling over himself and falling again until he smashed through some wooden beams to once again land hard. 

He could only groan as the pain registered, and while the back of his mind told him to get up, move, but he found himself incapable of doing so. He could feel splinters of wood poking into him around the rough concrete of the balcony he found himself on. He lay catching his breath, and just as he was attempting to mentally prepare himself to get up, he heard a voice.

“Mister Morgan! How nice of you to…drop in!” 

Arthur squinted at the man walking up the stairs towards him, his voice raising in pitch through his confusion as he exclaimed, “Trelawny? What in the hell are you doin’ here?”

Trelawny chuckled, “I think I should be the one asking you that, dear boy. After all, you have crashed through my pergola.”

“…your what?” Arthur couldn’t decide whether he had hit his head on the way down, or whether Trelawny was just talking nonsense. 

Trelawny chuckled and held out a hand to help Arthur up. Groaning more, he staggered to his feet.

“Now don’t be offended, my boy, but you look like shit!”

Arthur chuckled between groans, “well I reckon I feels like shit too. Hang on a minute, you never said what you’re doin’ here?” 

“Nor did you!” 

“You eh, hear anything about a lawman chase earlier on? That job that Dutch, Lenny and me were goin’ on might not’ve gone so well. Dutch got a nasty bump on the head, so I told Lenny to take on him back to camp while I kept the lawmen entertained.”

“I see, and well entertained they must have been, going by the state of you! I might have somewhere for you to lie low until morning, and to get yourself cleaned up, but you must promise not to tell a soul about it.”

Arthur blinked confusedly, but had no qualms in keeping a secret, so after giving Trelawny a nod the man ushered him through a door to safety.


End file.
